Miguel de Icaza: "To sum up: (a) First dimension: things change too quickly, breaking both open source and proprietary software alike; (b) incompatibility across Linux distributions. This killed the ecosystem for third party developers trying to target Linux on the desktop. You would try once, do your best effort to support the 'top' distro or if you were feeling generous 'the top three' distros. Only to find out that your software no longer worked six months later. Supporting Linux on the desktop became a burden for independent developers." Mac OS X came along to scoop up the Linux defectors.

CS in academia has been very UNIX-centric since the late 1970s. Around 2002, I began to notice Macs appearing among hard-core CS majors in college. By 2010, even the faculty had converted over. The people who weren't using Macs were Windows users who were happy to use Cygwin or to ssh into Linux machines. Linux was practically gone from the academic desktop.

I can empathize with Miguel's frustrations with Linux audio, because that was precisely what caused me to give up on Linux.

Once, after a system update, audio failed. I'd been using Linux casually until then, never having dug into the source code, so I figured I'd try it at least once and see how painful it'd be. In the sound card driver, I discovered that several of the boolean settings were backwards -- in other words, 0 meant true and 1 meant false! Not too bad -- an easy fix. Smugly, I thought that all bugs indeed were shallow.

Six months later, it broke again after a system update. The same fix no longer worked.

Screw this, I said, I'm going back to Windows. And since then, I've never lost audio after a Windows Update.

Brothers of Linux we need to keep modding down these posts related to broken updates to show they don't exist. I've modded over down over 10 thousand of them in my fight against the Evil Ones. My Linux Forum Defense Forces Golden Badge of Suppression should be in the mail.

Audio on Linux is a bloody mess indeed. The same can be said about their graphics, but at least there's Wayland to look forward to, which will make huge improvements to Linux in general.

But on the audio side, Jesus! ALSA, OSS, JACK, PulseAudio, Phonon, Gstreamer, KLANG...I mean, what the hell is going on here?!? Developers, let's get some consensus and put the focus on only one major audio system.